Embodiments of the present invention relate generally to methods and systems for creating, reporting, and handling trouble tickets in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and more particularly to an eService ecosystem that provides a common trouble ticket platform for creating and handling trouble tickets generated by and received from an Internet of Things.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application is one type of enterprise application that can provide support for customers of a product or service by allowing those users to make requests for service or otherwise report problems with those products or services. When a request or other report is received, the CRM application typically creates what is commonly referred to as a trouble ticket which is a record of the issue. This trouble ticket is then used by the CRM application as the system attempts to address the request or report, for example by assigning the trouble ticket to an automated process and/or human agent for answering the question or handling the problem.
Today, there is a ton of waste and inefficiency in how trouble tickets are created and reported. Typically, a consumer detects an issue with their appliance, car, gadget, software application, etc. and then they have to manually report the issue to an agent, who then tries to trouble-shoot the problem. A lot of information is lost in this manual process. Even some routine information such as a product serial number or even model number, are difficult to locate and awkward to communicate over the phone line. Reporting issues after-the-fact often also means that the problem may not be reproducible (e.g. an intermittent car failure) and/or major consequences could not be averted (e.g. refrigerator issue causing all the food to go bad). Today's manual approach to trouble ticket reporting is expensive for the product vendor and frustrating to the consumer. Hence, there is a need for improved methods and systems for creating, reporting, and handling trouble tickets in a CRM system.